Mark Cuban Did It and So Should You

For a couple of years now I’ve been telling you to harvest your blog posts, white papers and newsletters into a book. Could it be that Mark Cuban has been listening all along?

Until he says otherwise, I’m taking credit.

Cuban’s book, “How to Win at the Sport of Business: If I Can Do It, You Can Do It” is admittedly harvested from years of blog posts and sells for $2.99.

Here’s a guy whose blog readership hits between 50k-1m readers and he’s trying to sell what’s already out there in an ebook? Yep, and So Should You!

The WSJ notes that Cuban “refocused” the work and doesn’t expect readers to take it in like a literary masterpiece.  ”Don’t feel you have to read it like a book,” he writes in the book’s foreword. “Use it as a way to get fired up. A way to get motivated.”

Cuban’s book is about 30k words but I say you can go to market with half that.

 Here’s how to start writing a book:

• Do you read newspaper opinion columns? They average 700 words, so if you’ve written 22 pieces of that length, you could compile them into a book.
• Most blog posts average 300+ words, so 50 posts would total 15,000 words. Count the average words in your blog posts and do the math.
• How many speeches or presentations have you delivered?  Those add up, too.  If standard speech without long pauses runs 150 – 170 words per minute, a 20-minute speech is 3,000 to 3,400 words.  If you’ve delivered five 20-minute speeches on your subject, you’re ready to roll.
• Your old newsletter articles are good book fodder.

Read my series on writing, designing, publishing and promoting my book. Better yet, let’s get started on YOUR book.

Review: The Biker’s Guide to Business

Sure,  management consultant and avid motorcyclist Dwain DeVille could have delivered a book with lots of worksheets and case studies to walk a business owner through the difficult process of strategic planning. Thankfully he approached the subject from his own hard-won experience with entrepreneurial road rash and used motorcycling metaphors to keep our right brains engaged in the process.  He uses the straight talk and occasional cuss words that people seem to expect from bikers, too.

Hell, ask me where my company needs to be in five years, and I’ll answer without a moment’s hesitation. However, ask me where I want my life to be in five years and I couldn’t begin to tell you. And after all these years in business, that’s a pretty crappy place to be. I’d allowed the needs of the company to drive my personal life for too long. It was high time to anwer the question “What’s Next” and redefine my dreams. It was time to focus on my lifestyle.

Written for the business owner, not a cog in a big corporate wheel, The Biker’s Guide to Business: When Business and Life Meet at the Crossroads, DeVille’s philosophy sounds familiar to those of us who’ve read one of the eMyth books, but DeVille has his own spin on how to steer a company to serve its owner instead of the other way around.

DeVille is quick to point out his disdain for traditional business plans that end up collecting dust on the shelf. He insists that business owners who follow his process will walk away with a plan that can/will be executed. He provides these tools and instructions on his Bikers Guide to Business web site as well.

Dwain DeVille's book

Beginning with failure

DeVille pulls no punches in describing a business venture he took on for all the wrong reasons and the financial and emotional aftermath. That experience taught him that “the key to success isn’t recognizing opportunity, but instead recognizing the opportunities you should not chase.”

No sooner had he straightened things out on the business front, Deville faced a cancer diagnosis and the loss of a kidney. Wham-Bam.

He decided it was time for a road trip through the American west on a rented Road King, a move I totally understand! The fruit of his trip was a strategy for his own management consulting firm and the outline for this book, which is also available on Audible, narrated by the author in his delightful Louisiana accent.

Now DeVille leads three-day motorcycle retreats for business owners to help them achieve the same degree of clarity that his seminal trip provided to him.

The book is written not written exclusively for bikers; indeed DeVille does an excellent job explaining the motorcycling metaphors to the uninitiated. That said, I think bikers like me are bound to enjoy it on a deeper level.

Note to aspiring business authors

If you’re thinking of writing a book on a dry subject, like business planning, consider DeVille’s approach of filtering it through a metaphor or a simple tale (ex: The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari).

A couple of weeks after downloading a Kindle version of The Biker’s Guide to Business: When Business and Life Meet at the Crossroads, I received a personalized copy from its author, whom I “know” through Twitter. This is the first book that I have in both formats and it helped me see exactly how books differ between print and digital.  With that homework done, I recommend that business authors distribute their books in all three formats: print, digital and audio.

Presentation Tips from a Brain Doctor

While everyone else in my family, and perhaps the country, is obsessed with basketball, I’m enjoying a couple of of PBS shows that only come around during fundraising season. One of them features Dr Daniel Amen,  who is a child and adult psychiatrist and  brain imaging specialist.

For those who’ve never seen a PBS fundraising program, I’ll just summarize by saying the network offers a variety of shows that they interrupt every 20 minutes or so with requests for funds. The specials vary from arts to documentaries and seminars. Amen falls into the latter category. Take a 30-second look.

Five things to learn about presenting from Dr. Amen

1. Use a mantra. Dr. Amen’s is “thinner, smarter, happier.”
2. Repeat the mantra. Work the mantra into every section of your talk.  Amen will say “on your way to becoming thinner, smarter and happier you’ll also notice…”
3. Develop a Star Moment. I learned about Star Moments in Nancy Duarte’s book, Resonate.  Amen used a couple of them, but the one that grabbed the most attention was when Amen unveiled two large containers holding 70 pounds of fat, representing the amount of weight one of the audience members had lost on Amen’s program. The audience gasped in repulsion.  He picked one of the containers up, noting how difficult it was to carry around. He pointed to them a couple of times later in the talk. As someone who’s carrying the equivalent of one+ of those containers around, that certainly resonated with me.
4. Balance light and dark. Amen’s topics included obesity, brain injury, Alzheimer’s, ADHD and other unpleasant subjects, which he leavened with dashes of humor and wit. Tough to pull off, but worth the effort.
5. Practice until it’s graceful. I wouldn’t have remarked on Amen’s choreography without having turned off a different PBS health seminar a few days earlier because the presenter’s movements were mechanized instead of graceful.  The difference between the two programs was the difference between a sixth grader at cotillion and Fred & Ginger. It’s one thing when a colleague’s summary of last quarter’s sales is unpolished, but I expect quality from PBS. Instead, I found myself distracted from the message and picking apart everything the presenter said and did, which was unfair to both of us, but there you have it. I’m fatally human.

Here’s a presentation I did at the International Motorcycle Show in February. I’m open to all constructive criticism.

So, You Want to Write a Book

“Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.” ~  Marcus Tullius Cicero

While more people are inquiring about my ghost writing services this year, it seems once aspiring authors come to grips with what’s involved with writing a book, they cower.

If you find that you want to write a book after answering the series of questions in this post, let’s get started. If you’re discouraged, better now than later.

What are your goals for the book?

You do have goals for the book, right?

Very few people want to write a book just to check it off a bucket list — that’s the poet’s purview. Most business people are motivated by fame, fortune or passion for a cause.  These questions will help you determine whether a book will meet the goals you’ve set for it.

• How will you calculate the return on the investment of  your effort?  Your answer could be expressed in hard or soft dollars or social outcomes.
• Could you meet your goals by giving your book away? Or do you need a profit on your book? A good number of decisions hinge on your answer to this question, including whether self-publishing is preferred.
• Whose work is your audience reading today? What unique point of view do you offer?
• How many platforms can you distribute your content on? In other words, can you write it once and move it electronically, in print, through a recording, and perhaps video seminars?  Some books, for example coffee-table books, just don’t translate well to audio or text-only readers.

What’s your magnetism?

One of my (young adult) sons is a Jersey Shore fan. Please don’t judge me. I bring that wretched TV show into the conversation simply to make a point — Sookie’s book sells because the show has fans. Truth be told, I didn’t know Jersey Shore fans read books — the one in my house doesn’t.  But I digress.

The takeaway here is that A Shore Thing is an extension of the Jersey Shore franchise, not its cornerstone. If you want to sell your book quickly, you need a fan base, too. If you need to sell the book, not give it away, do you have at least 1000 people who would spend at least $5 for it? Would they spend $10? $20?

Too many people think that a book will bring them new fans/clients instantly.  This is possible if your existing fans are sufficiently motivated by your message to evangelize others into buying your book.  Otherwise you should count on paying — in some combination of time, effort and dollars — to promote your book. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

Two of the best resources I’ve come across to help you figure the book business out is Guerrilla Marketing for Authors: 100 Weapons to Help You Sell Your Work and Dan Poytner’s Self-Publishing Manual.  I suggest reading them before you begin writing your book, even if you intend to place your book with a publisher.

Bottom line: If you have a passion for your subject, you have clients/fans who are passionate about you or your message, and you’re willing to immerse yourself in the book project for a couple of years (writing and promoting it) a book might provide you with personal and professional satisfaction.  You might change lives and make the world a better place. You won’t know until you try.

If you’d like to talk about your project, reach out. Our first conversation is free.

Content is Content, Platforms are Platforms

A month ago I took a ten-day reading and writing sabbatical while dog sitting for friends. I came back refreshed, informed and ready to embrace emerging technologies and business models for content producers.

Yes, that’s the simplest way I can think of it, writers:  we’re content producers distributing our intellectual property on platforms. We need to get over the platform issue — whether people buy something we publish on cotton paper bound in leather or in a video shot from our smart phones and hosted by Vimeo.

Thrive or go crazy?

Godin's 12 bestselling books have been translated into more than thirty languages.

My advice is to accept this as fact, find a way to thrive or get out before it makes you crazy. I’ve decided to accept and thrive. To thrive, we must understand the underlying economics or fall in with those who do.

I’m following Seth Godin into this new territory.  His  latest Domino Project post on pricing helps:

The competition for a Kindle book isn’t the hardcover. The competition is a game on the iPad or a movie from Netflix or a song playing on your Sonos. Pricing is about substitutions, and if we want books to avoid becoming a tiny niche, we need to price accordingly. There are more substitutes, and they are cheaper than ever before.

And a librarian will lead the way

This video by a library IT guy does an outstanding job of contextualizing printed books in the overall scheme of content production and distribution. Don’t dismiss it because you don’t use libraries.

I love the way Eli Neiburg compares books to chiseled tablets and  papyrus scrolls, and eReaders to eight-track tapes. If a librarian can envision and embrace a future that doesn’t rely on dead trees but includes them (as appropriate), so can content producers.

Get on board, move over or get run over.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqAwj5ssU2c&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]

Three Things Business Authors Should Learn From Celebrity Autobiographies

Last night my friend Crystal Dempsey invited me and several other Charlotte women to the local premier of Celebrity Autobiographies. If this show comes to your town, definitely go to see professional actors read verbatim from books that were most certainly ghostwritten.

Oh, and if you’re lucky they’ll also read Suzanne Somers’ poetry (which probably wasn’t ghosted).

Sitting in the Booth Playhouse I found myself squirming at times, wiping away tears at others and often feeling ashamed of the ghost writers who were behind the work being read. For a taste of the brilliance I included a video at the bottom of the page.

Ghost writer takeaways for would-be business authors

1. Don’t add fluff. I don’t think I’ve ever read a celebrity autobiography, but if last night is indicative, they carry a surfeit of filler material, just like business books.  If you don’t have enough information to fill a book, write an article or eBook. You can always roll the articles up into a book later.
2. Don’t publish until it’s right.  Some (most?) of the celebs whose books were featured last night surely had second thoughts before they signed off on the final copy.  Surely? Yes, I’m sure Kenny Loggins had reservations when he wrote about his wish for day of passionate lovemaking sans birth control. Surely he did. I’m not advising business authors that they should delay publication until it’s the definitive work that the sands of time will never change — even history is re-interpreted.  Instead I’m telling you to listen to that little voice that says “This needs more data,” or ” I’m not sure this part needs to be in this book,” or “I don’t think  my point is clear.”
3. Hire for writing ability AND technical expertise. Celebrity autobiography ghost writers don’t need to be celebrities, they just need to understand the roller coaster of life — children are often misunderstood, everyone starts out a virgin, and some people are sharks — and draw their subjects out along those lines.  Hiring a business ghost writer is different. You don’t want to spend time as an author explaining to your ghost writer what an ETF is or who Michael Porter is or how the Fed’s money supply affects mortgage rates.

And here’s the promised clip.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joUn6XwY0Dk[/youtube]

Highly Relevant Content for Newsletters and Social Media Platforms

The folks at Sherpa produce excellent annual email marketing benchmarking reports.   The latest proves three things, in Sherpa’s words (my emphasis added):

1. Tactically, email appears to have unlimited potential especially when integrated with emerging marketing channels like social media.
2. As a mature tactic, performance improvements are no longer measured in quantum leaps but in incremental steps.
3. But when multiple improvement tactics are combined, performance is accelerated.

This is great news for people who’ve seen incremental steps instead of quantum leaps in their e-newsletter efforts and wonder if they’re “doing it right.”

It also reinforces my evangelizing to use email alongside social media platforms. Once you’ve produced highly relevant content recycle and promote it! If you do nothing more than place your newsletter articles in your blog and promote it with a tweet, you’ll reap rewards.

Takeaways for financial professionals who start with e-newsletters

Producing “highly relevant content” is a challenge for everyone, according to the report (see below). Regulated financial professionals have the added burden of compliance concerns with their relevant content, so it’s understandable, but not wise, that some opt for cookie cutter solutions.

My clients don’t work for the kinds of  firms that churn out white papers and newsletters like snowflakes in Siberia — nor do they want to. But they know they need to produce quality content — from blog posts to newsletters and social media updates —  on a regular basis.  They often struggle to imagine how they’ll fit research and writing into their agendas, which is why they hire me.

Enter the editorial calendar

The first thing I do with a client is map out an editorial calendar. This gives us a publishing schedule and a backbone of subjects, which we supplement with news from the 24×7 media machine.  I speak in more detail on this in the video below. It might help you think through ways to use a ghost writer or editor.

The importance of a ghost writer with subject matter expertise

If you want to work with a ghostwriter or editor, before you hire someone on the basis of their ability to use proper grammar and punctuation, I suggest you also ascertain how much they know about your field. Someone who knows your competitive and regulatory landscape will be easier to work with and can cross-pollinate best practices.

For example, because I write primarily for attorneys, financial advisors and accountants, I’m tuned into the news items that have the greatest bearing on their practices. I understand the implications of topics like an SEC ruling and Fed Funds Rate changes.  My clients can rely on me to suggest topics to supplement the items on their editorial calendars, which eases their content production burden.

Help me help you*

One way to help your ghostwriter is to forward news digests from your professional associations and Google Alerts. One of my clients, an attorney, has certain publications on email auto-forward, which gives me plenty of material for two or three weekly blog posts and the occasional series of articles on a hot topic.

Bottom line, you can stay focused on your work AND produce quality content at a regular clip with the right team. Get with it!

*one of my favorite lines from Jerry Macguire

Six Easy Questions for a Law Firm

One of my clients is looking for a new slogan. Would you please answer these SIX EASY QUESTIONS as part of my research?

“Involve Me, and I Will Understand”

Since I’m an avid BMW motorcyclist now, I came across this video on a forum I belong to.

Don’t dismiss it just because you’ve no interest in motorsports — there’s an important takeaway for professionals who want to connect at a deeper level with clients and prospects.

Involve = Engage

This video underlines the importance of engaging with clients and prospects instead of broadcasting to them.  BMW could have splashed its logo on the screen and called it a day, but wasn’t it a better idea to involve the audience? Even to the tiny extent of telling them to close their eyes?

The emotional nature of the message, “Look inside yourself…” and the novelty of the message’s delivery seared the brand into viewers’ memories. Granted, establishing an emotional connection in a novel way is more difficult for a lawyer than for BMW, but it’s being done every day.

Start with key messages that resonate emotionally

What are you selling? It’s not financial planning, accounting services and legal advice. Take it deeper. Is it security? An edge? Peace of mind? Reliability? These are emotion-laden terms, and they resonate where descriptions like financial planning, accounting services and legal advice clank and thunk.

If you can’t distill your key messages to something emotional for your audience, you’ll miss your mark. You’ll waste your time and your money.

Social media involvement

Social media is a natural way to engage clients and prospects. I know business professionals arriving late to the social media party with misguided expectations that a Facebook Page or Twitter account will work for them the way it works for a colleague or competitor who’s been at it for a while.  Like everything else in this world, social media produces a yield for those who do their spade work.

Spade work means “involving” yourself in the lives of your prospects and clients by giving away some of your expertise in the course of conversations and interactions. Yes, giving (some of ) it away. And yes, plural conversations and interactions. Social media success isn’t magic — it’s working a strategic plan over a period of time.  Spade work.

This is easier to do when you’re producing content – newsletters, blog posts, ebooks, white papers, books, videos, podcasts or presentations. When you’ve stocked your content pantry, it’s easy  link that content  to someone whose Tweet or status update indicates they need your expertise. Valuable content is a real “follower” magnet, too.

Connecting with audience

Being in front of a captive audience isn’t enough to ensure they’re engaged in your message. Take it a step further.  Several months ago I wrote about providing an audience with a  note taking guide along with my presentation.  Throughout the session I  drew their attention to the guide and invited them to share their notes and observations with the rest of the group.  This worked on a couple of levels — helping them stay with me and enlisting their fellow audience members to re-enforce my points.

As the video says, “Tell me something and I will forget. Show me something and I can remember. Involve me, and I will understand.” Therefore,  in every marketing plan, every communications plan, every pre-conference plan, in every thing, ask how you can involve and engage others in your emotional message.

Don’t Be So Punny

This Daily Show segment, while aimed at news shows, rings true for business communicators, too.  If you rely on puns to make a point, you’ll lose your audience. Get real!

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c You’re Not Punny www.thedailyshow.com

Have you ever had a pun backfire?  Got a story to share?  I’m compiling a Hall of Shame on this subject (with your help).

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